More Than You Bargained For (Patreon)

I should be writing about Steven Soderbergh's (quite lovely) High Flying Bird in this space, but that can wait for a little while. While I used to enjoy the practice of writing a short something-something about every film I saw -- formerly at Letterboxd, and now mostly here -- the experience has been a bit stressful of late. This is partly due to problems with my health. I have had a migraine headache off and on for the past week and a half, making my Spring Break a real oasis of relaxation. But it also has to do with the writing in general.

When I started writing about film, I had no real expectations. I was an academic and I saw cinema as one among many objects on which I could exercise my theoretical / analytical chops, ones I had previously trained on art and literature. But as time wore on, I started to feel a special kinship with the moving image. I don't always know what to say or do in social situations because they are moving targets, forever changing in terms of their mood, their dynamics, their axes of power. But cinema was like bounded life, life that was organized and composed and would allow me to get my bearings in relationship to it. And in most cases, I could go back to it, and it would always be the same. This allowed me to change without undue risk. Some people claim that cinephilia is fundamentally unhealthy, and for those people I might be a perfect case study, although I think over time I have mitigated these challenges, and the importance of cinema overall.

I wrote a short piece about the movie Crash (the bad one) over 15 years ago, and that was more of a structured rant than anything else. But I was young and the piece had a certain passion behind it. But the piece got picked up, and its reception (together with my failures in grad school) made me think that maybe I was a film critic, whatever that meant. I have been writing criticism ever since. But over the past few years I feel like I have lost that initial drive and passion, the naive but sincere impulse that made criticism seem like something I had to do. At a certain point, I felt like I wanted not just write but to change film criticism, to do something important and undeniable. I'm sure everyone feels that way at first, and it's frustrating, but part of the reality principle, when we (I) recognize that that's not going to happen.

Occasionally, when LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" comes up in my shuffle, I have to laugh. It's too perfect. Because the younger critics really are coming up from behind, with better words and better thoughts. And they are actually very nice. But where words used to simply flow out of me (and I can indeed "produce," or phone it in if need be), now I start to feel my obsolescence each time I sit down to the keyboard. My thoughts feel disorganized, hackneyed. I feel like my social and political insights are better expressed elsewhere, by others with more skin in the game. I feel like I should be somewhere else, doing something else.

I suspect this is a temporary phase, and because I am a depressive and on a shitload of medication, I can never actually trust any of my feelings. They are electrical impulses that happen without my consent, and unpleasant emotions are only as "real" as a computer glitch. And the bottom line is, I feel like writing is my job, one of my jobs, and I am going to keep doing it, regardless of how futile it sometimes seems. Maybe I can write my way through to the other side of whatever "this" is. 

But for now, I feel like I should simply acknowledge that, while I will keep producing regular content, I feel I am not producing my best work. This was a weird, regrettable time to set up a Patreon, where I am asking people to pay for what I consider to be substandard material. I invite you to abandon ship, no hard feelings. But please know that your support has been important to me, and I am making every effort to return the favor with the best writing I can do. And I keep hoping that a particular film, writing project, or even (gasp!) a TV show, will jolt me out of these doldrums and make this work feel vital again.

If you've read this far, I feel I owe you at least $1 back. Check your mail. 

Thanks,

Michael